Tectonic time travel: An interactive website reveals how the geographical location of today’s places has changed over the course of Earth’s history. It shows the geographical latitude at which the marked location was over the last 320 million years. Berlin, for example, was still on the equator back then. Such information is particularly important for classifying fossil finds and assessing the climate and other environmental conditions at the site where they were found.
The surface of the earth is in constant motion: continents are drifting towards each other or breaking apart, new oceans are forming. Due to plate tectonics, the position and distribution of land masses on our planet have changed significantly over the course of Earth’s history. In the Cretaceous period, Europe resembled an island world broken up by warm, shallow sea areas. In the period between 325 and around 200 million years ago, almost all continents were united in a single large landmass, the ancient continent of Pangea.
Drift across geographical latitudes
However, due to continental drift, the positions of places in relation to their geographical latitude have also changed significantly over time – with important consequences. “Latitude determines the angle of solar radiation and thus also the climate,” explain Douwe van Hinsbergen from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and his colleagues. Whether a place once had a tropical or arctic climate can therefore also be determined by its location at the time.
An interactive one Online tool now makes this geological journey directly visible to every place in the world. Just click on the location and you can see at what geographical latitude this location has been over the last 320 million years – all the way back to the time of the ancient continent of Pangea. “The next time you travel, take a look at Paleolatitude.org. You will then see what journey your destination has made over the course of millions of years,” says van Hinsbergen.
Reconstruction in three steps
The basis of this website is a paleogeographic model developed by the researchers and now further refined. For this, the team reconstructed the past position of the continents and places in three steps. The basis of the first step is plate tectonics, which shows the position of the land masses in relation to each other and their changes and deformations over time. “But in the next step, this reconstruction must be assigned to the correct geographical latitude,” says co-author Bram Vaes from the University of Aix-Marseille.
For this second step, the researchers evaluated the magnetic information preserved in the rock. “The angle of the magnetic field lines to the Earth’s surface changes from the poles to the equator,” explains Vaes. “Many rocks contain magnetic minerals that have preserved the orientation of the field lines at the time of their formation. By determining this, we can therefore determine at what geographical latitude the rock was formed.” In combination with dating of the rocks and data on polar migration, this results in a puzzle of places and times for the different places.
For their latest version of the paleolatitude tool, van Hinsbergen and his team also, in a third step, included deformations of the earth’s plates due to mountain formation and sunken microcontinents such as Greater Adria or Argoland. “This gives us a global model of unprecedented resolution,” says van Hinsbergen.
Interactive time travel
The team now has a version of its new tool on the website Paleolatitude.org made freely accessible. There you can, for example, mark your place of residence with a simple click and then find out what latitude it was at over the past 320 million years. But the new paleogeographic model is even more important for research. This allows paleontologists and geologists, for example, to assign fossil-bearing rock formations to a geographical location better than before.
“The unprecedented resolution of this tool offers new possibilities, for example to reconstruct the biodiversity of the past and its development,” explains co-author Emilia Jarochowska from Utrecht University. “We can see how global biodiversity changed in response to major climate changes, such as mass extinctions: which latitudes became uninhabitable, which became refuges?” But changes in ocean currents or the local climate can now also be better estimated with this model, as the team explains.
Source: Douwe van Hinsbergen (Utrecht University, Netherlands) et al., PLOS One, 2026; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0346817